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Hi, not sure if this is the place to ask this, but here's the situation:
we hired a professional to take photos of my dad's 90th birthday party and ended up with zero photos because he found he had a corrupted memory card in his camera. He said that's the first time he'd ever had that happen.
As a still novice, and not wanting to face this problem myself, I'm wondering... is there a way to forsee that a card has become corrupted? How long should one use a card?
Hazel--
In my experience I have had one or two off brand cards that went bad--I would not see anything ahead of time-and I got an error message. I reformatted the card--shot a bit more. Same error message. I used rescue software to recover the images.
I have had 1 Lexar card and 1 Sandisk card not work right out of the box. Sandisk promptly honored the warranty and sent me a new card. Lexar jerked me around a bit but I ultimatley got a new card which I sold to someone with a Nikon.
All may not be lost with the images of the party--Do you know if the photographer attempted to use any recovery or rescue software?
Rocky
Hazel I have had one corrupt card (out of about 23) which I never use any more. To get the images back I used a program called Photo Rescue. It worked pretty well, and I got most of the images back.
Hi - If he is a professional?? he should be attempting by any means necessary to recover your images for you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazel Grant
Have had this happen ONCE!!! - tried everything I knew to access the images with no luck - had no choice but to send the card to a professional data recovery service - who were able to recover every image - did take a while 3 weeks and cost $700 but it had to be done - client had to have the images and we had to keep our reputation of going above and beyond to keep our clients happy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazel Grant
Windows has a disk check utility that you can run on a memory card the same way you run it on a hard drive. With the
card plugged into the reader, right-click on that drive and go to Properties > Tools > Check now. If the card is faulty,
it should show up in that check.
http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/2862/disktest.jpg
No, I don't know, but assumed he did not. He did a great job on my daughter in law's wedding the next day but jerked me around, not answering my emails, calls for 2 months before finally saying there was nothing there.
Thanks for your help in letting me know there is hope if such happens to me, and thanks Dave for the checking procedure!
Sometimes a card will start acting flaky and when it does, stop using it. But any piece of equipment can fail without warning at any time. I have had over 40 cards in the last decade (mix of kingston, sandisk, lexar). I have had 3 cards fail (one kingston, and 2 sandisk). All three started acting flaky and I recovered all images. For example, I remember one card gave an error after taking a picture and I immediately stopped using it, and pulled it out of the camera. I got all the images off, reformatted it and tried some test shots. It failed again and I stopped using the card. A third sandisk card (new) was slow and I contacted sandisk support. They had me run a lot of diagnostics and then agreed the card would be replaced. They said I would shortly receive an email giving me the return info and codes. That was over a year ago and I'm still waiting.
Regarding the photographer who lost all images, that is very unfortunate. I suppose it can happen, but usually a card will give an error so one should get a clue. If he was not honest and was evasive on what happened, then I would never use him again. He should have tried recovery and if he couldn't get the images, tried a service. And refunded your money if he couldn't deliver the images.
Roger
